Wow, it's certainly been a quiet month for us here at Hardware Analysis thus far. Personally, I myself have been tied up with some other obligations, and certainly haven't had as much time left for the website as I would like. However, I hope to be back in the swing of things shortly.

In keeping with that, we thought we'd bring you up to date on some of the material we're currently working on. The majority of my time over the next few weeks will be consumed by Iwill, which was generous enough to supply us with two of its latest boards, the P4R533-N, and the MPX2.

The P4R533-N is a Socket-478 Pentium 4 board based on the 850E chipset. It marks Iwill's first shot at an RDRAM-based desktop board. The board is a completely original design, and offers an impressive feature set, including support for PC1066 RDRAM. We've had this one up and running in house for a few days now, and expect to have an article up for your reading pleasure in short order.

The second of the boards provided to us is Iwill's MPX2, a dual Socket-462 board for Athlon MP processors, based on AMD's 760MPX chipset. As some of you may or may not remember, our initial experiences with Tyan's Thunder K7 board were far from what we would describe as positive. We have high hopes for the MPX2, but we'll be approaching it with all due caution. Performance was never an issue with regard to the dual Athlon platform -- we've always been quite pleased with the performance and price compared to it's Xeon counterparts -- so this article will focus primarily on stability and compatibility.

Looking down the barrel of Iwill's excellent-looking MPX2. Six PCI slots (including two 64-bit/66MHz) are on tap, as well as AGP Pro-50 support.

It will be at least two weeks before we post that article, though, as we're still collecting all the parts necessary to ensure everything goes off without a hitch. AMD was gracious enough to provide us with two Athlon MP 2000+ processors, and we're currently waiting on a 550W power supply to feed the thirsty Athlon MPs before we begin.